Two members of hacking groups Lizard Squad and PoodleCorp were charged yesterday with “conspiring to cause damage to protected computers,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois said in a statement. Both hacking groups have taken credit for temporarily bringing down online gaming services …

Looks like some banned Overwatch players might be reacting a little more poorly than we’d first thought, with a DDoS attack knocking the game—and by extension a lot of other Blizzard titles—out of service this afternoon.

Sega Saturn disc drives are beginning to die off. Until now, it meant your machine might be useless. Thanks to engineer James Laird-Wah, Sega’s 32-bit hardware has been cracked, allowing games to be loaded via USB.

Not long after this year’s E3 showfloor opened up for exhibitors, the internet started gossiping about a hacker who was supposedly trying to pilfer the impressive Zelda: Breath of the Wild demo from right under Nintendo’s nose. For some skeptics, it sounded too incredible to be true.

On Monday, Mark Dougan, a former deputy with the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, noticed a truck that had been idling outside his Palm Beach Gardens home for an unusually long time. He stepped outside to question the driver and was quickly surrounded by at least a dozen FBI agents.

More than two months after release, it’s still not possible to pirate Just Cause 3. The same is true for Rise of the Tomb Raider, released for PC in late January. Cracking computer games used to be measured in hours or days, but now, it’s turning into weeks and months. The nature of piracy is changing in a big way.

This has been a tough year. Pop culture let us down in many ways, even as our political system and our social institutions revealed a deeper seam of ugliness. But speculative fiction still offers us hope: not just optimism about human ingenuity, but actual reasons to look forward and keep our heads up.

A U.S. judge has sentenced 23-year-old David Pokora to 18 months in prison for his involvement in a group that stole software from Microsoft, Valve and other companies. (Read more about Pokora and crew in this piece.)

Trading Pokémon typically requires another person to swap monsters with you. But, sometimes trading with someone else is a hassle. And that's why one guy decided to make the whole trading process easier for himself.

After unlocking "The Void," the Mario Kart 8 hackershave started to put stuff inside of it. In their latest video, the fraternal modding duo MrBean35000vr and Chadderz show what happened when they started dropping odds and odds (like giant stacks of goombas) into an empty track they found in the game. Neat!